


Drums of the City Rain

by hopeless_eccentric



Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [32]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Character Study, Depression, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Juno Steel Needs a Hug, Junoverse | Juno Steel Universe, Post-Episode: s01e18 Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place, Rita Appreciation (Penumbra Podcast), Self-Hatred, essentially after season one with rita being a good friend, kind of? like a friendship study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28351515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: “But a girl’s gotta know,” Rita finished. “Where the heck were you? Where the heck are you? Are you alive? I mean, we talked about you being alive, even though you didn’t confirm that you weren’t some kind of phone zombie, which you sound like you could be, but—”Juno broke her off with a phrase he hadn’t said since his wedding day and hadn’t meant in two decades.“Rita, you’re fired.”Commission for SarcasticSargassum!!
Relationships: Rita & Juno Steel
Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921492
Comments: 28
Kudos: 110





	Drums of the City Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SarcasticSargassum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarcasticSargassum/gifts).



> oh man. so just as a general warning, this one deals with a lot of general s1-typical juno issues so just keep an eye out (sad badum tss) for those!!
> 
> Content warnings for internalized ableism (juno not liking having lost an eye), alcohol dependency (no alcohol in-fic, just mentioned), depression, guilt

Gravitational pull was one of those things Juno expected never to need to worry about. It happened to planets and asteroids and satellites, and in the very back of his mind, it happened to him. It was supposed to be one of those mundane things he never thought about too much, like the chemical makeup of the air or the blue tint of the dome overhead.

Gravity wasn’t supposed to be one of those things that happened in between people or in between thoughts and places, and yet, here he was with his mind dragging back to that half-empty hotel room a few blocks away and the pull of Peter Nureyev still aching around his head.

Trying to think about something else didn’t seem to help much either. He couldn’t bitch and moan about the chill without thinking about how warm it had been inside. He couldn’t even lament that his car was lost somewhere across the planet, for Nureyev had driven them out there in the first place. He couldn’t even try to focus on the dark streak across his vision knowing exactly who had held him and pretended not to whisper sweet nothings every time he came out of experimentation with his eye leaking blood like tears.

Instead, he walked. He tried to ignore the ache in his back and the pounding in his head and the memory of the neon rain-streaked streets reflecting in Peter Nureyev’s eyes, which he would never see again if fate decided to be kind to either of them. If all went well, Nureyev would find someone else to waste his affection on and Mars would keep spinning.

That didn’t mean that guilt stopped weighing like a chain around his neck. That didn’t stop his chest from feeling cold and cored out and a little too shaky for his own good. 

He needed a drink. 

More pressingly, he needed a ride. Maybe he’d had the gall to leave in the middle of the night with his organs tied in knots and no note on the nightstand, but that didn’t mean he had guts to show his face in public. 

The world didn’t know that the weight on his shoulders and the fluttering of some slow and numbed thing that might have been panic under better circumstances were clawing tooth and nail at one another. The world didn’t know he had done anything out of the ordinary at all. That didn’t mean he felt like he deserved to show his face in public.

Seemingly just to spit on him, the rain picked up.

Big, cold drops sank their teeth into his neck and soaked his face and hair and bandages until not even his coat served as refuge from the biting weather. While the city had looked like a hazy neon dream in the misting precipitation earlier, Juno couldn’t make out much more than blurred streaks of blue and pink and red in an eye that was wet with something he didn’t want to think about.

With no car and no willingness to wait another forty minutes for the bus, Juno swallowed his pride, dove beneath the bus stop for cover, and took out his comms.

It took two rings to convince himself Rita wouldn’t answer. He wasn’t even sure what date it was, let alone time. If she was smart, she would’ve already gotten another job. She didn’t have any responsibility to a boss who wasn’t around to pay her, let alone disappeared for weeks at a time and came back missing an eye and the only thing that made him a decent detective in the first place.

He hung up without a second thought and merely pulled his coat tight around himself. There were worse places to spend the night.

That hotel room felt even warmer and drier and gentler by the minute.

Before Juno could even swallow down his resignation, his comms beeped. He didn’t check the screen, assuming a wrong number. However, they rang out again, more insistently this time. Juno tried to wipe his eyes on the rain-soaked sleeve of his coat and answered without checking the caller.

“Look, I’m sorry, I wish I could’ve—”

“Mistah Steel!” Rita broke him off. “Oh my God, boss, it’s been weeks and I was super worried about you because you’ve gone missing before, but never like this, and I called Mistah Mercury and even Sasha Wire to try and find out if they had any idea what had happened to you—and lemme tell you, Agent Wire doesn’t like it one bit when you call her on her work comms, but I feel like she could’ve been a little nicer to me anyway—but I’m just so glad to hear you’re alive and you’ve got enough limbs to hold a phone and you’re not dead—unless you’re some kinda zombie who can dial your comms and then hang up on somebody—”

“Rita,” Juno choked out.

“Sorry, boss.”

“It’s—” Juno swallowed. “It’s fine.”

Rita was silent for just a moment too long. Juno wished he could have found something to say, but every word felt withered upon his tongue.

“Are you okay, Mistah Steel?”

Juno had been dreading the question. For as much as he tried to push them all down, he had a nasty habit of wearing his emotions on his sleeve. It certainly didn’t help that Rita had known him for nearly two decades and had been able to read him like a shitty tabloid the entire time.

He knew there wouldn’t be any getting back his dignity if he answered honestly, so he didn’t.

“Made some cosmetic changes,” he tried to joke.

“Mistah Steel, if you got another one of those stupid piercings you’re gonna complain about for the next three months, I ain’t gonna be so nice about it this time,” Rita warned him. “But I will help you look for cute loose shirts until it heals.”

“What? No, I—” Juno found himself choking on his words again. “Thank you. For the shirt thing I mean, but I don’t know how much you can really help with this one.”

“Yeah, any time, boss,” Rita returned lightly. “But that still don’t change the fact that I have no clue where the heck you are, and I haven’t seen you in what’s gotta be weeks, and I know it’s three in the morning—”

“Three?” Juno sputtered.

“But a girl’s gotta know,” Rita finished. “Where the heck were you? Where the heck are you? Are you alive? I mean, we talked about you being alive, even though you didn’t confirm that you weren’t some kind of phone zombie, which you sound like you could be, but—”

Juno broke her off with a phrase he hadn’t said since his wedding day and hadn’t meant in two decades.

“Rita, you’re fired.”

It meant a lot of things over the years. He first growled it out in anger, then eventually, as some kind of joke. Her firing came to mean some kind of code of recognition, or on occasion, something so specific he didn’t quite have words for it. The last time he had said it, it meant the same thing as the present. He didn’t know how to explain his hurt, nor did he want to think about it for too long. That didn’t mean he didn’t need help, even if he felt like too much of a piece of garbage to ask for it.

He had put it into better words on what was supposed to be his wedding day, but he had also been drunk enough to put it in any words at all. Now, he seemed to choke on every single one of them.

Rita, who was too smart for her job or her lousy boss or her own good, knew exactly what he meant.

“Oh.”

Juno swallowed and nodded, as if she could see.

“God, I’m sorry for waking you up—”

“Where do you need me to pick you up? I’m already on the way to my car, so don’t you dare try to back me outta this one,” Rita cut him off quickly. “And don’t you beat yourself up neither, you sound like you could use a hug.”

Juno let out a cold laugh and tried his best to pretend it hadn’t almost sounded like a sob.

“I’m just saying the truth, boss,” Rita added. “I’m gonna keep you on the comms until I get here, okay? You don’t have to say anything, I’m tracing your location.”

“You can do that?”

“Not really far, but it works for some minor emergencies. I dunno how I’d feel if it could go a bit farther, ‘cause in this one stream I saw, Watership Down 56: Revenge of the Ninth Graders Who Had to Read it for Class—”

Juno groaned.

“The stupid one with the rabbits?”

“The stupid 56th one with the rabbits,” Rita corrected. “Well, in that one, there’s this guy who’s managed to secretly hack all these comms and he’s using them to keep an active map of where everybody on the planet is for his own secret evil reasons, and—”

Rita continued for some time, going into tangents about three or four other streams before finishing her connection about the first one. All the while, Juno let his head rest against the glass wall to his side, not particularly caring about the far-off echo of an advertisement’s lights fizzling out on the station’s screen, nor the pounding of the rain playing a distant drum. He half-listened to Rita’s story while she half-listened to him, pausing every few sentences to make sure he was still awake and breathing and didn’t need any immediate medical attention before she got there.

As much as the rain’s aching sound and the blurry reflections off the pavement could have lulled him to sleep, nothing made him want to stay awake like the sound of his secretary, and if he was being honest with himself, best friend, as she listed off all the details and connections no ordinary person would be able to remember.

Juno was fairly sure he would be stuck to the bench by the time Rita’s car pulled up. It turned out that wasn’t too much of an issue.

“Mistah Steel!” Rita cried as she kicked the door open and sprinted across the sidewalk to greet him.

Juno wouldn’t have expected her to be strong enough to drag him up onto his feet and into a hug, but he also hadn’t expected a knot to form at the back of his throat at the embrace that was exactly what he needed while numbness buzzed in his brain and two decades’ worth of guilt pulled at his shoulders. Rita was saying something, but he couldn’t particularly make out words, all of them soaked in tears and buried into the front of Dahlia Rose’s button down.

“Hey,” he finally croaked back when she pulled off of him. “You’re gonna get your hair wet.”

“Well, then we oughta get you back to my apartment,” Rita insisted impatiently, as if it was obvious.

“What?”

“I said we better get you back to my apartment. Geez, Mistah Steel, you gotta get your ears cleaned out or something,” Rita repeated as she dragged him into the passenger’s seat.

“Did my building burn down?” He snorted dryly. “I think I can take care of myself.”

Rita started the engine, shaking her head.

“Mistah Steel,” she sighed. “I don’t know what happened, and I ain’t gonna ask until you’re ready to tell me. I don’t even gotta know about your eye. I just think I’d be a real lousy friend if I let you be alone right now.”

If he’d been a little more awake and a little less aching from injury and cold and rain and lack of sleep, he might have shot back some response. Instead, he merely nodded and let the rest of the night blur by.

At some point, he found himself warm and almost dry beneath a few too many blankets on Rita’s couch after he had turned down her ‘ladies night pillow fort a few too many times. 

The clock on the wall across from him said it was almost five. Rita had lost out to slumber first, curled up in a chair she refused to leave until Juno fell asleep. She looked a little too comfortable for Juno to have the heart to move her.

In a few hours, Peter Nureyev would wake alone. Juno wouldn’t. With or without a friend gently snoring across the room, Juno knew he would have to deal with that burden of knowledge alone.

For the time being, he took a deep breath. He repositioned himself to try and get a little warmer, though it felt as if the hole bored into him by regret had filled with icy rainwater. He tried and failed to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry?
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading!! Make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below or ill elaborate MORE on Watership Down 56
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 !!


End file.
